The findings could be a boon for biotechnologists, and help synthetic biologists reprogram bacteria to make new drugs and biological devices.

By combining high-speed “next-generation” DNA sequencing and DNA synthesis technologies, Sriram Kosuri, a Wyss Institute staff scientist, George Church, a core faculty member at the Wyss Institute and professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, and Daniel Goodman, a Wyss Institute graduate research fellow, found that using more rare words, or codons, near the start of a gene removes roadblocks to protein production.